SELECTED BY
KATHERINE MCCOY
HIROSHIMA APPEALS
DESIGNED BY
KUNIOMI UEMATSU
This poster by the Japanese graphic designer Kuniomi Uematsu was part of the influential Hiroshima Appeals series of Japanese peace posters against nuclear war directed to an international audience.
The nonverbal communication of this poster’s powerful imagery is masterful. Because of its global audience, the message cannot depend on words from any one language and must communicate using symbols. Visual symbols are more widely understood than verbal texts from specific languages, so symbolic images are important tools for communications designers.
This poster is not beautiful in the conventional sense, but to me (a perpetual student of visual communication) it is beautiful in its power and universality. Each element of this rather simple image carries two or more meanings. Taken literally, the image is an iconic photographic representation of a piece of burned toast with holes punched in it and jelly oozing through a hole. But this photo is packed with powerful symbolic associations. The toast is the shape of a nuclear mushroom cloud. It has been burned and damaged, suggesting the violence of nuclear holocaust. The toast is also a skull shape, and the holes make a face with eyes, nose, and a grimacing mouth—a frightening image of death. The jelly becomes blood and gore, or tears weeping from an eye. The poster demonstrates rhetorical irony, too—toast and jelly are very familiar and comforting breakfast foods, provided by our mothers when we were children. This suggests that nuclear war could surprise any of us, even in our sheltered homes and most domestic moments. There is even an embedded visual/ verbal pun, although the poster’s Japanese-speaking designer may have been unaware of it: In a nuclear war, “You’re toast.” In so many ways, this image makes us think deeply about the horror of nuclear war.